For purity of air and water, chemicals and working hands is a vital matter to the paper maker. Every operation must needs be as cleanly as sleepless precaution can make it.
From the mountain of rags on her left the sorter plucked material and picked it over the lattice, an open wire-work sieve spread before her. Standing beside it was a short upright knife used to cut the rags and sever from them the buttons, hooks and eyes, whalebones and other extraneous additions that had belonged to their earlier incarnations. These knives were made from old steel scythes worn too thin for husbandry, but here answering a final purpose of value. The hones hummed from time to time, for the busy knives needed constant sharpening. Their cutting edge turned away from the workwoman and to it she brought the material—fragments of every garment ever manufactured from spun cotton.
The history of many a single rag had been a feminine epic, from its plucking in a far off cotton field to its creation, use, adventures, triumphs, tragedies and final dissolution. Here they were from the dust heaps of a continent, from the embracing of bodies noble and simple, high and low, young and old, sweet and foul.
Their tags and buttons were swiftly cut away and each grille exhibited a strange assortment of trophies—pearl and glass, metal and foil, whalebone and indiarubber. Even so many foreign substances escaped the sorters, to be captured at a later period in the purification of the rag.
The women sat back to back and there was little speech among them. Their hands twinkled in a sort of rhythmic measure from right to left and left to right. Then, as their baskets were filled, came Alice Barefoot to carry them away and pile fresh accumulations from the thresher.
To-day the work was old rag; but sometimes a consignment of fragments and overplus from the collar and shirt factories arrived clean and white. Out of them had garments been cut and the remnants needed nothing but shortening and dismemberment upon the knives and picking over for coloured threads, or rubbish that hang about them.
Here reigned Lydia and herself worked at a lattice with the rest. She had only come to the Mill when her husband died; but her skill proved great and her influence greater. Blind-folded she could have done her sorting and separated by touch the cotton, or linen, from any other textile fabric. She was clad in a big white garment and had wrapped her head and neck in a pale blue handkerchief so that her face only appeared.
Next to her sat a girl, and sometimes they spoke.
Daisy Finch was a big blonde maiden, a friend of Medora’s; and concerning Medora the pair kept up a fitful conversation. But Lydia’s eyes were about her while her hands swiftly ran through the rags. She marked all that was going on from her place at the end of the row, and sometimes cried out a direction, or word of admonition.
“She don’t tell me nothing,” said Daisy. “She just leaves you with a sort of general feeling she ain’t happy, then she’ll turn it off and say, ‘talk of something else,’ though all the time we haven’t been talking of anything in particular. Of course it ain’t anybody’s business.”